Association between urinary metals and leukocyte telomere length involving an artificial neural network prediction: Findings based on NHANES 1999–2002

OBJECTIVE: Leukocytes telomere length (LTL) was reported to be associated with cellular aging and aging related disease. Urine metal also might accelerate the development of aging related disease. We aimed to analyze the association between LTL and urinary metals. METHODS: In this research, we screened all cycles of National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) dataset, and download the eligible dataset in NHANES 1999–2002 containing demographic, disease history, eight urine metal, and LTL. The analysis in this research had three steps including baseline difference comparison, multiple linear regression (MLR) for hazardous urine metals, and artificial neural network (ANN, based on Tensorflow framework) to make LTL prediction. RESULTS: The MLR results showed that urinary cadmium (Cd) was negatively correlated with LTL in the USA population [third quantile: −9.36, 95% confidential interval (CI) = (−19.7, −2.32)], and in the elderly urinary molybdenum (Mo) was positively associated with LTL [third quantile: 24.37, 95%CI = (5.42, 63.55)]. An ANN model was constructed, which had 24 neurons, 0.375 exit rate in the first layer, 15 neurons with 0.53 exit rate in the second layer, and 7 neurons with 0.86 exit rate in the third layer. The squared error loss (LOSS) and mean absolute error (MAE) in the ANN model were 0.054 and 0.181, respectively, which showed a low error rate. CONCLUSION: In conclusion, in adults especially the elderly, the relationships between urinary Cd and Mo might be worthy of further research. An accurate prediction model based on ANN could be further analyzed.